Tag: NEF

The New Economics Foundation’s Centre for Well-being, a leading think tank for well-being research and policy, expressed concern today about apparent disparities in well-being between ethnic groups. The corresponding report says the following:

“We find that Black, Arab, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Indian people experience significantly lower well-being than White people in the UK, even when controlling for individual characteristics”.

The research might have controlled for individual characteristics (I don’t know, I haven’t read through it yet…), but what about cultural characteristics?

The questions that the participants in the study were asked were based on self-perception (i.e. how the participants view themselves and their lives). This raises issues. We know, for instance, that according to the latest research there is good reason to believe that those from North America are more likely to show positivity biases than those from Asia, potentially causing them to inflate their own self-rating for life satisfaction (Kim, Schimmack & Oishi, 2012). Then there are the potential language issues that arise from trying to ask subjective questions of those that don’t necessarily share the same first language (the report doesn’t mention what language(s) the participants speak).

I tweeted the Centre for Wellbeing to ask if they had controlled for cultural interpretation of well-being. They responded: “We didn’t control for cultural interpretation. Could be explanatory factor, needs investigation“.

Maybe it doesn’t matter much at this stage, but due consideration of cultural differences is surely going to be crucial as well-being research becomes increasingly influential in policy-making.